bungakertas (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bungakertas) wrote2022-03-20 07:46 pm
bungakertas) wrote2022-03-20 07:46 pm
Entry tags:
Sherlock Holmes and the Thief Of Souls
Although they argued it back and forth many times over the next few days, Lestrade eventually decided that the best way to ensure they didn't loose any information on the case was to have more people working on it than could possibly be needed. With such an enormous crowd involved, it was highly unlikely that whoever was disturbing their memories would be able to make everyone forget. Sherlock had argued for a highly complicated plan involving recordings of everyone there, but he had been overruled by Lestrade on the grounds that such extreme measures were more likely to cause problems than solve them.
So here he was, trying to focus on the crime scene. It was another flat, and Sherlock felt like he was constantly stepping over too many people the entire time. This victim, a man, had lived on the fourth floor of his building and Sherlock and John had taken the stairs to avoid the wait for the elevator. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves as John put on his blue suit, noting that the ginger and dark-haired crime scene techs that handed them these things were new, as he'd never seen them before. He and John proceeded to the victim's bedroom.
Adolphe Selwyn had brown hair and was somewhere in the neighborhood of his mid sixties—though with these victims, age was hard to judge—and was lying in bed looking as if he'd simply gone to sleep and decided not to wake up.
"No!" Sherlock said immediately upon entering the room. "No, no, absolutely not."
"Not the murderer?" Lestrade asked, baffled.
"Not helpful!" Sherlock said, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice. "Look, he's just like all the rest. No row this time, victim was likely attacked in his sleep," Sherlock said, irritably inspecting the left arm. "Same tattoo, same place. Useless! There's nothing here. No mistakes."
"Sherlock," Lestrade started, clearly irritated.
"I can't see what isn't there," Sherlock returned even more angrily. "This murderer is clever. They aren't leaving clues. No, there's nothing here to see." He strode towards the door.
"Well, what do you propose we do, then?" John demanded.
Sherlock reached out and grabbed two forensic techs—the same two that had handed them their gloves—by the backs of their blue suits and hauled them bodily into the room. "I would propose that we ask these two gentlemen here what exactly they think they're doing in your crime scene."
"What's your problem?" the ginger one demanded, twisting away.
"Yes, I think you've manhandled us quite enough, thank you," agreed the dark one. He had an odd scar, shaped exactly like a lightning bolt, in the centre of his forehead.
"What are you doing with my techs?" Anderson demanded, poking his head in the doorway.
"Are you quite certain they're your techs?" Sherlock demanded.
Lestrade, John, and—thankfully—Anderson all immediately gave the two a second look and their body language instantly became more hostile.
"Who are you?" Anderson snapped, displaying confidence for once in his life. "I've never seen either of you before."
The two exchanged a glance—just a tiny, split-second one—and suddenly Sherlock found himself on the floor. A second thud indicated Anderson getting the same treatment as the two raced out of the room.
Sherlock was back on his feet and after the two fleeing men in a second with John and Lestrade hot on his heels.
"Stop them!" he yelled, hoping someone would recognise them as out-of-place. "Those two men! Stop them now!" Only two people caught on fast enough to make attempts at restraining the fleeing men, and neither of them were successful.
They raced around the corner and into the stairwell. Sherlock lengthened his stride, reaching the door a second later, but just as he opened it he heard two small pops.
He rushed headlong into a totally empty stairwell. John and Lestrade entered a second later. Sherlock descended halfway down the staircase, looking up and down, but neither man was anywhere to be seen.
Sherlock barely restrained himself from pounding the walls in frustration.
"They can't just vanish," Lestrade protested. "We'll search the stairwell and find out how they did it."
"It won't matter," Sherlock sighed. "They'll still have escaped." He ran an irritable hand through his hair. "And they'll be back, in any case. They or someone working with them."
"Our memory thieves?" Lestrade said.
"Without doubt." Sherlock agreed. "And after that, they will be twice as intent upon destroying our memories of this encounter."
Lestrade smiled a feral smile at that. "How well do you think they'll respond to a threat?"
Sherlock raised a brow at him. "A threat?"
"Whoever these people are, they're trying to keep a low profile," Lestrade shrugged. "It seems to me that getting kicked straight to the top of the most wanted list in the United Kingdom would be an undesirable event for them. We all saw their faces. It should be simple enough to arrange things so that if any of us loose our memories of this little dust-up, they spend the next week leading off the evening news."
Sherlock laughed, but John looked viciously satisfied. "You tell me who to describe them to, and I'll give you every single freckle that ginger one had."
And it was true. Sherlock would have been bored for the next half-hour, except that John was rather bizarrely intent on getting the police sketches of these two exactly, perfectly, totally correct. By the time they were finished, Sherlock would've sworn they were looking at photographs of the two men, not drawings. And when they finished, John made a polite excuse and a beeline for the door.
"I'll send you the photos from the scene later," Lestrade told Sherlock, peering after John.
"Do that," Sherlock nodded, sweeping out himself. He caught up to his flatmate on the sidewalk outside. "John! What is it?"
John frowned. "I don't like being attacked when I can't fight back. Altering our memories…Sherlock, it could change who we are. We're going to find whoever's doing this."
Sherlock nodded. "Yes. We are."
They hailed a cab. On the way back to Baker Street John received a phone call and had to go in to work. Sherlock went back to the flat. He frowned at the kitchen, realizing that the results of his eyeball experiment had been lost along with his memories. He contemplated asking Molly for new, but decided against it and settled for staring moodily at mirror and everything around it, not really contemplating the case but not able to completely take his mind off of it.
That was unusual for him. He could generally put a case from his mind when he had reached a point from which there would be no going forward without new developments. Finally, in a desperate attempt to banish the case from his mind—further contemplation on it was pointless and would only serve to bias him in one direction or the other—he retrieved his violin from its case and began to play.
What began as an effort to play as much of one of Bach's two-part inventions as it was possible to play with a single violin shortly turned into an improvised concerto of frustration. Almost without his conscious direction, Sherlock's hand raced across the fingerboard. He played and played until even the bow seemed too heavy in his hand and he looked up.
John was emerging from the kitchen, with take-away boxes in hand, two of which he set in front of Sherlock with a pointed look.
Sherlock frowned. "What time is it?"
"Half-seven," John replied easily. "You've been playing for over an hour."
"I didn't even hear you come in," Sherlock answered with a blink. He carefully set his instrument back in its case, though he didn't close it.
"No, you were focused," John said. He was smiling though.
Sherlock irritably seized the chopsticks John offered him and snatched up a piece of broccoli. "I have never encountered a murderer this clever. Even Moriarty left some clues. This person…it's like they can do magic."
"We can do magic, mate," announced a new voice. Sherlock immediately identified it as the voice of the ginger not-tech from earlier.
He turned to look as he casually ate his broccoli. Three people stood just inside the door of their flat. The Ginger, the man with the scar who had very green eyes, and a woman with hair that might kindly be described as "fly-away."
"If you're about to try and take our memories again," John said tightly, "don't."
"We don't have a choice," Green-Eyes said, sounding genuinely sympathetic. "We're under strict orders to maintain the Statute."
"If you try anything, your faces will be broadcast from one end of Britain to the other by the end of the week," Sherlock informed them, munching on a piece of chicken now. "INTERPOL will have copies of the case file the day after that. Who knows? You may even make a mention in the American news by the end of the month."
"The police are our next stop," the Ginger explained.
"That won't change anything," Sherlock shrugged.
"What do you mean by that?" the Hair demanded, eyes narrowing. "If someone doesn't make a phone call by a certain time, the story goes forward? Something like that?"
"Oh, no," Sherlock answered with a smile.
"No, it's much better than that," John agreed, smiling as well.
"What then?" the Ginger asked.
"Let's just say that there are copies of the case files where even we can't get to them right now," John replied. "But they include letters that tell us that if we don't remember this case, we should take it to the news and name you two—" and here he pointed to the two men "—as the suspected murderers."
"If you want to maintain a low profile, it really would be best to leave our memories intact," Sherlock finished, casually taking some rice now.
"What do you mean you can't get to them?" Hair demanded.
Sherlock was hardly about to tell her that he and John had simply made two copies of the file, written letters to themselves, put the all these things into packages, and then posted the parcels to their own flat. Lestrade had done something similar. The files would be in the post at least overnight, but they'd be utterly inaccessible until they were delivered. At least, by normal means. On the chance there were abnormal means of getting at them, he was keeping the specifics to himself. "I mean that I honestly don't know where my copy is at the moment. Or precisely when I'll get it back. But I will. Soon. And when that happens, your secret won't just be out with us, it'll be out with everyone."
Green-Eyes and Ginger looked flummoxed. Hair, on the other hand, narrowed her eyes. "How do we know you're telling the truth?"
"I suppose," Sherlock replied, in an identical tone to hers, "that the only way you'll find out is if you call my bluff."
There was a long silence. Finally, Hair leaned back on her heels. "All right," she said, "I have to admit that was clever. So, what do you want?"
"Not messing with our minds would be a good start," John hissed angrily.
"Listen," Ginger began slowly, "we didn't hurt you—"
"Not the point," John said.
"—and we really don't have any choice with this," he finished. "It's much better that we keep our secret."
"Magic?" Sherlock asked with a laugh. "You're going to have to try better than that."
"How do you think we vanished earlier?" Green-Eyes put in.
"Lestrade has a whole team working on that right now," Sherlock answered with a shrug.
Ginger rolled his eyes, pulled out a thin stick and flicked it towards Sherlock's violin. A jet of light shot from the stick to the violin which instantly sprouted short, pink fur.
Sherlock contemplated, for a second, rejecting what he saw as impossible. He did not like the idea of magic. It ran against his nature to accept the concept as plausible. On the other hand, it also ran against his nature to deny something so obviously true. The stick had created light, which was impossible. His violin was now furry and pink (a state of affairs that might lead to another murder, very soon).
So, magic.
He elected to focus on the immediate problem. "What," Sherlock demanded in a voice as cold as ice, "have you done to my violin?"
"Pink and fuzzy," the Hair tsked. "Honestly, Ron."
"I know I'll get that one right," the Ginger returned with a grin. He turned to face Sherlock with a smile that, for all the world, appeared as though he thought they were somehow in accord with one another. "We've got two little rugrats. Charming things not to have sharp edges is the first thing you learn."
"Congratulations, I'm sure," Sherlock answered, deliberately not specifying whether it was for the children or for what—he suspected—was rather unremarkable magical skill. This did not go unnoticed by the Ginger, either, whose eyebrows drew together in a puzzled and not-quite-but-almost offended frown. "However, I assure you," Sherlock continued, "there is absolutely nothing ‘right' about the state of my violin."
"Merlin, you sound like Snape," the Green-Eyes sighed.
The Hair took out a stick of her own—a wand, Sherlock realised, vaguely surprised at how well he was managing to take this considering he'd reacted very poorly to the possibility of a giant dog from Baskerville—and waved it with a roll of her eyes, restoring his instrument to its proper state. Sherlock immediately stood, closed the violin case, and moved the instrument into his bedroom and out of the line of fire.
A tense silence reigned until he returned and sat down.
"Well, then," Green-Eyes said. "My name is Harry Potter. These are Ron and Hermione Weasley. It's nice to meet you."
"I can't say the same," John said. "You've been mucking about with my brain, and I don't find your cavalier attitude about it the least bit pleasant."
Potter sighed. "Look, that magic Ron just did, he can only do because you're all ready so close that you may as well know everything and you can no longer be obliviated for knowing what you do. But we are required, by law, to erase the memories of any muggles who come too close to learning we exist."
"‘Muggles' being people who aren't you, I presume," Sherlock sneered.
"And ‘we' being…magicians?" John added, managing to make his question sound both innocently curious and utterly disdainful all at once.
"We call ourselves wizards, actually," Ron Weasley supplied helpfully.
"How very patriarchical of you," John said.
Sherlock smirked.
"Listen, you have to understand," Hermione Weasley began.
"No," Sherlock returned. "We don't have to understand anything. You have attacked us, toyed with our minds, interfered with a police investigation, insulted myself and my friend quite thoroughly, and done so in our own flat no less. I do believe that will be quite enough from you. Leave. Immediately."
The three exchanged an uneasy look, but they turned and left down the stairs without a further word. Sherlock waited until he'd heard the door close, counted to five and then leaped up, seizing his coat and scarf as he dashed down the stairs.
Though John was initially taken off guard, he caught on at once and was behind Sherlock after a brief detour through the kitchen to retrieve his own jacket.
They left their building looking oh-so-casual and followed their erstwhile intruders onto Marylebone Road. Although it took some caution, they even got close enough to hear their conversation.
"…And anyway, what did you expect them to do, Ron? They were hardly going to be happy hearing we'd been messing about with their memories," Hermione-with-the-hair was saying.
"It was still quite rude of them," Ron returned. "Since they knew we couldn't mess about with anything this visit, it wouldn't have hurt them to be polite."
"Ron, stop being ridiculous. They're right and you know it. You're just being difficult about admitting it," Hermione snapped.
John offered Sherlock a pleased look at that.
"In any case," Potter broke in before that side of the conversation could go any further, "who wants to be the one to explain to the Minister that we have unauthorised activity going on, on our biggest case, that we now can do nothing about stopping without making things worse than they are?"
The other two winced.
"We'd best hope the Prophet doesn't catch wind of this, either," Ron said after a moment. "We'd never hear the end of it."
Sherlock's eyebrows went up at Potter's body language after this statement. Apparently there was a great deal of negative history with this "prophet," whatever that referred to.
"It isn't as if they aren't printing enough about this case already," Hermione said, sounding almost like she was snarling. "Death Eaters dying like this, the purebloods all leaning on the Ministry to stop it quickly, and everyone else leaning on the Ministry to look the other way! It's like a circus."
There was a pause and then Ron said, "I'm not sad that these people are being killed. I won't miss them—"
"Ron, you can't—!"
"Hear me out, Hermione," he said. "It's not them that bothers me, it's that they don't mean anything anymore. The war's over. Voldemort's dead. The Dark Mark is just a ruddy ugly thing on their arms now. We none of us fought that fight so that every bloody idiot could go about bringing it up over and over again years later.
"I'm not angry because they're killing Death Eaters. I'm angry because they're bringing back part of history that I'd rather never came back."
Hermione leaned in to kiss his cheek—forcing Sherlock and John to duck ungraciously behind a group of teens outside a shop—and said something they couldn't catch. The three continued on walking, apparently done talking except to make sure they didn't get lost, eventually reaching Charing Cross Road.
Sherlock and John weren't following that far behind, so when the three turned and simply vanished into a brick wall between a chip shop and a bookstore, they both bolted forwards at the same time.
"They can't've done," John protested, beating on the wall a few times to make sure it was solid.
"They can do magic," Sherlock said, turning in irritation. "Apparently, we're being prevented from following them."
The two caught a cab back to Baker Street and their cold takeaway. Sherlock managed to restrain himself until the front door closed and then he seized John's shoulders. "Magic, John! Actual magic!" He raced up the stairs to look at the assorted portions of the case clustered around their mirror. "That's how the murderer's doing it. They're not cleverer than me, they're just better equipped."
"I'm pleased your ego has recovered," John said dryly, taking their dinners to the microwave. But his voice had a note of amusement in it, so Sherlock didn't turn. Didn't explain how his mind was the only thing that made him a remotely worthwhile human being so he couldn't let anyone be cleverer than him. Even Moriarty was at least funny. Without his mind, Sherlock had nothing. But since he hadn't driven John off and he hadn't been beaten after all—at least, not in cleverness, which was the only arena that counted—he didn't have to explain.
"That's how he avoids the cameras. He is invisible. Or he has a way of entering and exiting that doesn't require walking in a door. That's how he keeps them from just getting up and saving themselves. They're dead from the moment he beats them in a fight. It just takes some time for their bodies to catch up, is all."
He stared for a moment, completely caught up in the possibilities as John came and placed his food very deliberately in front of him on the mantelpiece and closed his fingers around his chopsticks, forcing him to take them.
"It seems to me," John observed, taking a bite of his own dinner, "that this is an awfully convoluted way to kill someone if you could simply magic them dead."
"There must be limits to what they can do—oh." Sherlock gloomily snatched up his food and stomped back to the couch. "Well spotted, I suppose." Without knowing what things magic users were or weren't capable of, he couldn't eliminate or confirm anything. "How very inscrutable of them, I admit. I wonder what Lestrade will say?"
"That we should both be sectioned," John said. "Sherlock, even if your violin were still pink and fuzzy, we'd have a hard time convincing him that someone made it that way with magic. I'm still half-convinced that they didn't, and I saw it happen with my own eyes."
"It does fit all the data," Sherlock said.
"But magic, Sherlock? It's a big stretch," John sighed. "One which I am provisionally accepting—for the moment—but…well, it's just a possibility I've always felt was rare."
Sherlock debated whether or not to question John's choice of saying "rare" and rejected it in favor of scowling at his flatmate. How could he not see that if it wasn't magic then it meant Sherlock had been outsmarted and that just couldn't be?
John laughed. "They don't seem to think much of us, though?"
"What, people who can't do magic?" Sherlock asked curiously.
"You heard the way they said ‘muggles,'" John replied. "People who have to be protected from their amazing secret at all costs. Either because it's too wonderful for our tiny little brains or because we're such barbarians we can't be trusted with the knowledge."
"How is that relevant to the case?" Sherlock said, mystified.
"It isn't," John snapped. "It's just…irritating."
"What, bigotry? Boring," Sherlock shrugged.
"Only when you aren't the one suffering because of it," John countered.
"We're hardly worse off because of them."
"We'd have no way of knowing if we were, would we?" John countered. "They can change our memories and they're keeping their own existence secret. Who knows what they may have done to us?"
Sherlock blinked. He thought this over for a moment and then shook his head. "No. If they had that much power, our threat to expose them wouldn't have even made them blink."
"Well that's comforting I suppose." John dug into his food. "What are we going to tell Lestrade?"
"We'll have to tell him the truth at some point. We may as well start off telling him the truth and keep doing it until he believes us," Sherlock replied.
"Let's hope he doesn't throw us off the case, either. Not that that's ever made a difference to you before."
Sherlock nodded. "Precisely."
Sherlock ate half of his own dinner, mostly to humour his friend—though he flat refused to do anything so mundane as washing up—and solemnly promised to get at least four continuous hours of sleep before the next morning so that John wouldn't feel bad about going to bed. And, because it felt important to at least try to do what John asked, he did spend four hours in bed that night, though he only managed to sleep for two of them.
He didn't like the implications of John's hesitance to accept that there was real magic involved. Perhaps he was being too quick to accept the explanation that absolved him of failure. It would unquestionably be a failure if he had missed some clue as to how all this could be accomplished without magic. So he had been overjoyed to find an explanation that would let him off that hook.
But what if he had been wrong? What if there wasn't one?
Worse than that, John seemed to think that was the case already. That Sherlock had missed something along the line. But how could he think that, since he clearly didn't seem to think differently of Sherlock? Why would John even bother if it weren't for his own cleverness?
Except that didn't track very well with what Sherlock knew of John. He was not the type to be upset about something but expect Sherlock to figure that thing out on his own. Even if he knew that Sherlock could or would figure it out. When he was frustrated or angry or irritated, he said so. If he wasn't any of those things, however, Sherlock didn't know what the problem was or how to untangle it.
John always claimed it wasn't so hard to have friends, but Sherlock couldn't understand how that could possibly be. Even with only one, he was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
His flatmate was the most irritating man he had ever met, Sherlock decided. He'd never let anyone fuss over him or stayed up worrying about their opinion before in his life. And just for that, he was going to start playing violin as soon as he woke up, which would be about 5:15 AM.
Satisfied in his plan for revenge, he quickly fell into a pleasant sleep.
So here he was, trying to focus on the crime scene. It was another flat, and Sherlock felt like he was constantly stepping over too many people the entire time. This victim, a man, had lived on the fourth floor of his building and Sherlock and John had taken the stairs to avoid the wait for the elevator. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves as John put on his blue suit, noting that the ginger and dark-haired crime scene techs that handed them these things were new, as he'd never seen them before. He and John proceeded to the victim's bedroom.
Adolphe Selwyn had brown hair and was somewhere in the neighborhood of his mid sixties—though with these victims, age was hard to judge—and was lying in bed looking as if he'd simply gone to sleep and decided not to wake up.
"No!" Sherlock said immediately upon entering the room. "No, no, absolutely not."
"Not the murderer?" Lestrade asked, baffled.
"Not helpful!" Sherlock said, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice. "Look, he's just like all the rest. No row this time, victim was likely attacked in his sleep," Sherlock said, irritably inspecting the left arm. "Same tattoo, same place. Useless! There's nothing here. No mistakes."
"Sherlock," Lestrade started, clearly irritated.
"I can't see what isn't there," Sherlock returned even more angrily. "This murderer is clever. They aren't leaving clues. No, there's nothing here to see." He strode towards the door.
"Well, what do you propose we do, then?" John demanded.
Sherlock reached out and grabbed two forensic techs—the same two that had handed them their gloves—by the backs of their blue suits and hauled them bodily into the room. "I would propose that we ask these two gentlemen here what exactly they think they're doing in your crime scene."
"What's your problem?" the ginger one demanded, twisting away.
"Yes, I think you've manhandled us quite enough, thank you," agreed the dark one. He had an odd scar, shaped exactly like a lightning bolt, in the centre of his forehead.
"What are you doing with my techs?" Anderson demanded, poking his head in the doorway.
"Are you quite certain they're your techs?" Sherlock demanded.
Lestrade, John, and—thankfully—Anderson all immediately gave the two a second look and their body language instantly became more hostile.
"Who are you?" Anderson snapped, displaying confidence for once in his life. "I've never seen either of you before."
The two exchanged a glance—just a tiny, split-second one—and suddenly Sherlock found himself on the floor. A second thud indicated Anderson getting the same treatment as the two raced out of the room.
Sherlock was back on his feet and after the two fleeing men in a second with John and Lestrade hot on his heels.
"Stop them!" he yelled, hoping someone would recognise them as out-of-place. "Those two men! Stop them now!" Only two people caught on fast enough to make attempts at restraining the fleeing men, and neither of them were successful.
They raced around the corner and into the stairwell. Sherlock lengthened his stride, reaching the door a second later, but just as he opened it he heard two small pops.
He rushed headlong into a totally empty stairwell. John and Lestrade entered a second later. Sherlock descended halfway down the staircase, looking up and down, but neither man was anywhere to be seen.
Sherlock barely restrained himself from pounding the walls in frustration.
"They can't just vanish," Lestrade protested. "We'll search the stairwell and find out how they did it."
"It won't matter," Sherlock sighed. "They'll still have escaped." He ran an irritable hand through his hair. "And they'll be back, in any case. They or someone working with them."
"Our memory thieves?" Lestrade said.
"Without doubt." Sherlock agreed. "And after that, they will be twice as intent upon destroying our memories of this encounter."
Lestrade smiled a feral smile at that. "How well do you think they'll respond to a threat?"
Sherlock raised a brow at him. "A threat?"
"Whoever these people are, they're trying to keep a low profile," Lestrade shrugged. "It seems to me that getting kicked straight to the top of the most wanted list in the United Kingdom would be an undesirable event for them. We all saw their faces. It should be simple enough to arrange things so that if any of us loose our memories of this little dust-up, they spend the next week leading off the evening news."
Sherlock laughed, but John looked viciously satisfied. "You tell me who to describe them to, and I'll give you every single freckle that ginger one had."
And it was true. Sherlock would have been bored for the next half-hour, except that John was rather bizarrely intent on getting the police sketches of these two exactly, perfectly, totally correct. By the time they were finished, Sherlock would've sworn they were looking at photographs of the two men, not drawings. And when they finished, John made a polite excuse and a beeline for the door.
"I'll send you the photos from the scene later," Lestrade told Sherlock, peering after John.
"Do that," Sherlock nodded, sweeping out himself. He caught up to his flatmate on the sidewalk outside. "John! What is it?"
John frowned. "I don't like being attacked when I can't fight back. Altering our memories…Sherlock, it could change who we are. We're going to find whoever's doing this."
Sherlock nodded. "Yes. We are."
They hailed a cab. On the way back to Baker Street John received a phone call and had to go in to work. Sherlock went back to the flat. He frowned at the kitchen, realizing that the results of his eyeball experiment had been lost along with his memories. He contemplated asking Molly for new, but decided against it and settled for staring moodily at mirror and everything around it, not really contemplating the case but not able to completely take his mind off of it.
That was unusual for him. He could generally put a case from his mind when he had reached a point from which there would be no going forward without new developments. Finally, in a desperate attempt to banish the case from his mind—further contemplation on it was pointless and would only serve to bias him in one direction or the other—he retrieved his violin from its case and began to play.
What began as an effort to play as much of one of Bach's two-part inventions as it was possible to play with a single violin shortly turned into an improvised concerto of frustration. Almost without his conscious direction, Sherlock's hand raced across the fingerboard. He played and played until even the bow seemed too heavy in his hand and he looked up.
John was emerging from the kitchen, with take-away boxes in hand, two of which he set in front of Sherlock with a pointed look.
Sherlock frowned. "What time is it?"
"Half-seven," John replied easily. "You've been playing for over an hour."
"I didn't even hear you come in," Sherlock answered with a blink. He carefully set his instrument back in its case, though he didn't close it.
"No, you were focused," John said. He was smiling though.
Sherlock irritably seized the chopsticks John offered him and snatched up a piece of broccoli. "I have never encountered a murderer this clever. Even Moriarty left some clues. This person…it's like they can do magic."
"We can do magic, mate," announced a new voice. Sherlock immediately identified it as the voice of the ginger not-tech from earlier.
He turned to look as he casually ate his broccoli. Three people stood just inside the door of their flat. The Ginger, the man with the scar who had very green eyes, and a woman with hair that might kindly be described as "fly-away."
"If you're about to try and take our memories again," John said tightly, "don't."
"We don't have a choice," Green-Eyes said, sounding genuinely sympathetic. "We're under strict orders to maintain the Statute."
"If you try anything, your faces will be broadcast from one end of Britain to the other by the end of the week," Sherlock informed them, munching on a piece of chicken now. "INTERPOL will have copies of the case file the day after that. Who knows? You may even make a mention in the American news by the end of the month."
"The police are our next stop," the Ginger explained.
"That won't change anything," Sherlock shrugged.
"What do you mean by that?" the Hair demanded, eyes narrowing. "If someone doesn't make a phone call by a certain time, the story goes forward? Something like that?"
"Oh, no," Sherlock answered with a smile.
"No, it's much better than that," John agreed, smiling as well.
"What then?" the Ginger asked.
"Let's just say that there are copies of the case files where even we can't get to them right now," John replied. "But they include letters that tell us that if we don't remember this case, we should take it to the news and name you two—" and here he pointed to the two men "—as the suspected murderers."
"If you want to maintain a low profile, it really would be best to leave our memories intact," Sherlock finished, casually taking some rice now.
"What do you mean you can't get to them?" Hair demanded.
Sherlock was hardly about to tell her that he and John had simply made two copies of the file, written letters to themselves, put the all these things into packages, and then posted the parcels to their own flat. Lestrade had done something similar. The files would be in the post at least overnight, but they'd be utterly inaccessible until they were delivered. At least, by normal means. On the chance there were abnormal means of getting at them, he was keeping the specifics to himself. "I mean that I honestly don't know where my copy is at the moment. Or precisely when I'll get it back. But I will. Soon. And when that happens, your secret won't just be out with us, it'll be out with everyone."
Green-Eyes and Ginger looked flummoxed. Hair, on the other hand, narrowed her eyes. "How do we know you're telling the truth?"
"I suppose," Sherlock replied, in an identical tone to hers, "that the only way you'll find out is if you call my bluff."
There was a long silence. Finally, Hair leaned back on her heels. "All right," she said, "I have to admit that was clever. So, what do you want?"
"Not messing with our minds would be a good start," John hissed angrily.
"Listen," Ginger began slowly, "we didn't hurt you—"
"Not the point," John said.
"—and we really don't have any choice with this," he finished. "It's much better that we keep our secret."
"Magic?" Sherlock asked with a laugh. "You're going to have to try better than that."
"How do you think we vanished earlier?" Green-Eyes put in.
"Lestrade has a whole team working on that right now," Sherlock answered with a shrug.
Ginger rolled his eyes, pulled out a thin stick and flicked it towards Sherlock's violin. A jet of light shot from the stick to the violin which instantly sprouted short, pink fur.
Sherlock contemplated, for a second, rejecting what he saw as impossible. He did not like the idea of magic. It ran against his nature to accept the concept as plausible. On the other hand, it also ran against his nature to deny something so obviously true. The stick had created light, which was impossible. His violin was now furry and pink (a state of affairs that might lead to another murder, very soon).
So, magic.
He elected to focus on the immediate problem. "What," Sherlock demanded in a voice as cold as ice, "have you done to my violin?"
"Pink and fuzzy," the Hair tsked. "Honestly, Ron."
"I know I'll get that one right," the Ginger returned with a grin. He turned to face Sherlock with a smile that, for all the world, appeared as though he thought they were somehow in accord with one another. "We've got two little rugrats. Charming things not to have sharp edges is the first thing you learn."
"Congratulations, I'm sure," Sherlock answered, deliberately not specifying whether it was for the children or for what—he suspected—was rather unremarkable magical skill. This did not go unnoticed by the Ginger, either, whose eyebrows drew together in a puzzled and not-quite-but-almost offended frown. "However, I assure you," Sherlock continued, "there is absolutely nothing ‘right' about the state of my violin."
"Merlin, you sound like Snape," the Green-Eyes sighed.
The Hair took out a stick of her own—a wand, Sherlock realised, vaguely surprised at how well he was managing to take this considering he'd reacted very poorly to the possibility of a giant dog from Baskerville—and waved it with a roll of her eyes, restoring his instrument to its proper state. Sherlock immediately stood, closed the violin case, and moved the instrument into his bedroom and out of the line of fire.
A tense silence reigned until he returned and sat down.
"Well, then," Green-Eyes said. "My name is Harry Potter. These are Ron and Hermione Weasley. It's nice to meet you."
"I can't say the same," John said. "You've been mucking about with my brain, and I don't find your cavalier attitude about it the least bit pleasant."
Potter sighed. "Look, that magic Ron just did, he can only do because you're all ready so close that you may as well know everything and you can no longer be obliviated for knowing what you do. But we are required, by law, to erase the memories of any muggles who come too close to learning we exist."
"‘Muggles' being people who aren't you, I presume," Sherlock sneered.
"And ‘we' being…magicians?" John added, managing to make his question sound both innocently curious and utterly disdainful all at once.
"We call ourselves wizards, actually," Ron Weasley supplied helpfully.
"How very patriarchical of you," John said.
Sherlock smirked.
"Listen, you have to understand," Hermione Weasley began.
"No," Sherlock returned. "We don't have to understand anything. You have attacked us, toyed with our minds, interfered with a police investigation, insulted myself and my friend quite thoroughly, and done so in our own flat no less. I do believe that will be quite enough from you. Leave. Immediately."
The three exchanged an uneasy look, but they turned and left down the stairs without a further word. Sherlock waited until he'd heard the door close, counted to five and then leaped up, seizing his coat and scarf as he dashed down the stairs.
Though John was initially taken off guard, he caught on at once and was behind Sherlock after a brief detour through the kitchen to retrieve his own jacket.
They left their building looking oh-so-casual and followed their erstwhile intruders onto Marylebone Road. Although it took some caution, they even got close enough to hear their conversation.
"…And anyway, what did you expect them to do, Ron? They were hardly going to be happy hearing we'd been messing about with their memories," Hermione-with-the-hair was saying.
"It was still quite rude of them," Ron returned. "Since they knew we couldn't mess about with anything this visit, it wouldn't have hurt them to be polite."
"Ron, stop being ridiculous. They're right and you know it. You're just being difficult about admitting it," Hermione snapped.
John offered Sherlock a pleased look at that.
"In any case," Potter broke in before that side of the conversation could go any further, "who wants to be the one to explain to the Minister that we have unauthorised activity going on, on our biggest case, that we now can do nothing about stopping without making things worse than they are?"
The other two winced.
"We'd best hope the Prophet doesn't catch wind of this, either," Ron said after a moment. "We'd never hear the end of it."
Sherlock's eyebrows went up at Potter's body language after this statement. Apparently there was a great deal of negative history with this "prophet," whatever that referred to.
"It isn't as if they aren't printing enough about this case already," Hermione said, sounding almost like she was snarling. "Death Eaters dying like this, the purebloods all leaning on the Ministry to stop it quickly, and everyone else leaning on the Ministry to look the other way! It's like a circus."
There was a pause and then Ron said, "I'm not sad that these people are being killed. I won't miss them—"
"Ron, you can't—!"
"Hear me out, Hermione," he said. "It's not them that bothers me, it's that they don't mean anything anymore. The war's over. Voldemort's dead. The Dark Mark is just a ruddy ugly thing on their arms now. We none of us fought that fight so that every bloody idiot could go about bringing it up over and over again years later.
"I'm not angry because they're killing Death Eaters. I'm angry because they're bringing back part of history that I'd rather never came back."
Hermione leaned in to kiss his cheek—forcing Sherlock and John to duck ungraciously behind a group of teens outside a shop—and said something they couldn't catch. The three continued on walking, apparently done talking except to make sure they didn't get lost, eventually reaching Charing Cross Road.
Sherlock and John weren't following that far behind, so when the three turned and simply vanished into a brick wall between a chip shop and a bookstore, they both bolted forwards at the same time.
"They can't've done," John protested, beating on the wall a few times to make sure it was solid.
"They can do magic," Sherlock said, turning in irritation. "Apparently, we're being prevented from following them."
The two caught a cab back to Baker Street and their cold takeaway. Sherlock managed to restrain himself until the front door closed and then he seized John's shoulders. "Magic, John! Actual magic!" He raced up the stairs to look at the assorted portions of the case clustered around their mirror. "That's how the murderer's doing it. They're not cleverer than me, they're just better equipped."
"I'm pleased your ego has recovered," John said dryly, taking their dinners to the microwave. But his voice had a note of amusement in it, so Sherlock didn't turn. Didn't explain how his mind was the only thing that made him a remotely worthwhile human being so he couldn't let anyone be cleverer than him. Even Moriarty was at least funny. Without his mind, Sherlock had nothing. But since he hadn't driven John off and he hadn't been beaten after all—at least, not in cleverness, which was the only arena that counted—he didn't have to explain.
"That's how he avoids the cameras. He is invisible. Or he has a way of entering and exiting that doesn't require walking in a door. That's how he keeps them from just getting up and saving themselves. They're dead from the moment he beats them in a fight. It just takes some time for their bodies to catch up, is all."
He stared for a moment, completely caught up in the possibilities as John came and placed his food very deliberately in front of him on the mantelpiece and closed his fingers around his chopsticks, forcing him to take them.
"It seems to me," John observed, taking a bite of his own dinner, "that this is an awfully convoluted way to kill someone if you could simply magic them dead."
"There must be limits to what they can do—oh." Sherlock gloomily snatched up his food and stomped back to the couch. "Well spotted, I suppose." Without knowing what things magic users were or weren't capable of, he couldn't eliminate or confirm anything. "How very inscrutable of them, I admit. I wonder what Lestrade will say?"
"That we should both be sectioned," John said. "Sherlock, even if your violin were still pink and fuzzy, we'd have a hard time convincing him that someone made it that way with magic. I'm still half-convinced that they didn't, and I saw it happen with my own eyes."
"It does fit all the data," Sherlock said.
"But magic, Sherlock? It's a big stretch," John sighed. "One which I am provisionally accepting—for the moment—but…well, it's just a possibility I've always felt was rare."
Sherlock debated whether or not to question John's choice of saying "rare" and rejected it in favor of scowling at his flatmate. How could he not see that if it wasn't magic then it meant Sherlock had been outsmarted and that just couldn't be?
John laughed. "They don't seem to think much of us, though?"
"What, people who can't do magic?" Sherlock asked curiously.
"You heard the way they said ‘muggles,'" John replied. "People who have to be protected from their amazing secret at all costs. Either because it's too wonderful for our tiny little brains or because we're such barbarians we can't be trusted with the knowledge."
"How is that relevant to the case?" Sherlock said, mystified.
"It isn't," John snapped. "It's just…irritating."
"What, bigotry? Boring," Sherlock shrugged.
"Only when you aren't the one suffering because of it," John countered.
"We're hardly worse off because of them."
"We'd have no way of knowing if we were, would we?" John countered. "They can change our memories and they're keeping their own existence secret. Who knows what they may have done to us?"
Sherlock blinked. He thought this over for a moment and then shook his head. "No. If they had that much power, our threat to expose them wouldn't have even made them blink."
"Well that's comforting I suppose." John dug into his food. "What are we going to tell Lestrade?"
"We'll have to tell him the truth at some point. We may as well start off telling him the truth and keep doing it until he believes us," Sherlock replied.
"Let's hope he doesn't throw us off the case, either. Not that that's ever made a difference to you before."
Sherlock nodded. "Precisely."
Sherlock ate half of his own dinner, mostly to humour his friend—though he flat refused to do anything so mundane as washing up—and solemnly promised to get at least four continuous hours of sleep before the next morning so that John wouldn't feel bad about going to bed. And, because it felt important to at least try to do what John asked, he did spend four hours in bed that night, though he only managed to sleep for two of them.
He didn't like the implications of John's hesitance to accept that there was real magic involved. Perhaps he was being too quick to accept the explanation that absolved him of failure. It would unquestionably be a failure if he had missed some clue as to how all this could be accomplished without magic. So he had been overjoyed to find an explanation that would let him off that hook.
But what if he had been wrong? What if there wasn't one?
Worse than that, John seemed to think that was the case already. That Sherlock had missed something along the line. But how could he think that, since he clearly didn't seem to think differently of Sherlock? Why would John even bother if it weren't for his own cleverness?
Except that didn't track very well with what Sherlock knew of John. He was not the type to be upset about something but expect Sherlock to figure that thing out on his own. Even if he knew that Sherlock could or would figure it out. When he was frustrated or angry or irritated, he said so. If he wasn't any of those things, however, Sherlock didn't know what the problem was or how to untangle it.
John always claimed it wasn't so hard to have friends, but Sherlock couldn't understand how that could possibly be. Even with only one, he was constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop.
His flatmate was the most irritating man he had ever met, Sherlock decided. He'd never let anyone fuss over him or stayed up worrying about their opinion before in his life. And just for that, he was going to start playing violin as soon as he woke up, which would be about 5:15 AM.
Satisfied in his plan for revenge, he quickly fell into a pleasant sleep.